The Gondola Scam Read online

  "Same thing, love."

  "Is it?" She shivered, but only listlessly from habit, and looked about. Her car was nearby. Women never trust a bloke when he's trying to be truthful.

  I fumbled in my pocket to see what gelt I had left. Maybe enough.

  "Come on, love," I said, pulling her across the road to the shop. "I'll buy you a replacement stocking. Can I put it on your lovely leg?"

  "I've two legs, darling." She managed a wan smile.

  "A whole pair, then," I said recklessly. "Hang the cost."

  Any woman leaving is the end of an era. No two ways about it, Connie's absence was bad news. Lucky I was so busy, or I'd have suffered even more. The worst bit is realizing how sad she'd be too. I couldn't see the point of her going, but women are always boss in a relationship, and if that's what she felt was timely, I suppose it had to be. I mean, a man can't simply leave a woman, not off his own bat. He simply gets pushed out by the bird. A woman on the other hand has that inner power to sling her bloke or her hook any day of the week. Oh, of course birds complain about blokes "leaving," but that's only punishment for failing to live up to her expectations. At least Connie had given me the sailor's elbow for a material—not emotional—reason, which is good going for Lovejoy Antiques, Inc.

  I'd just put her stocking on her. It had taken three hours. She was overlaying me the way she liked to afterwards.

  "If I asked you not to go, Lovejoy . . . ?"

  I gave her my million-watt stare of transparent honesty. "Who said anything about going anywhere, love? Where's this daft idea come from?"

  She sighed then and dressed slowly, because she knows I like to watch. I could tell she didn't believe a word, but women are notorious cynics. She came back to give me a kiss before she went, blotting her eyes. I waved her off from the bed. She was just in a funny mood.

  A ten-point turn to negotiate the gateway, the engine sounding horribly final.

  Gone.

  I lay there thinking. Money. I must get money. Venice is such a hell of a way. This called for one of my antique orgasms.

  By four o'clock I was going full steam. I'd sold my papier-mâché fake chair—as a genuine antique, of course—in a part exchange high-mark deal to Elena on North Hill, coming away with a rough old oil panel of a long-haired bloke with lace cuffs and a cravat. Genuinely oldish—say late eighteenth century—but poor artistry. You can still get them for a song in any antique shop in East Anglia. I inscribed some famous-sounding name on the reverse, like "Port of Abraham Cowley" and an illegible signature, and decided to flog it for twice what Elena could, and before nightfall too. A high-mark deal is one where you part-exchange items and come away with money as well, because your item is worth more than the other bloke's. I did well out of Elena and my chair.

  With the money I put a deposit down on a nineteenth-century wrought-iron church porch lantern, all bonny hexagonal panels intact, told Brad I'd pay him the balance by the weekend, and carted it to Patrick's (resplendent today in a vermilion poncho). There I sold it for a profit and used the gelt to buy a group of six French hand shlittles, Georgian, from Margaret Dainty. These little things come in old engraved steel, ivory, or wood, and are avidly sought by collectors nowadays. I borrowed John Cronan's phone in the Arcade to contact a Midland shlittle collector from my book, priced them high and got him to promise to post off a money order within an hour. I told John I'd owe him for the phone call when the stingy swine moaned, and sent Tinker to the post office to wing the shlittles off northwards.

  Ten minutes later I sold the "Abraham Cowley" portrait for a good price to Markie and Beatrice in the Red Lion. I pretended to be broke—this comes easy—and desperate for money. "I'd meant to restore it," I said, hoping to God the marker-pen signature which I'd scribbled on the bottom comer wouldn't rub before they got it home. I'd thoughtfully penciled a Christie's auction number on the frame beneath the canvas tacking, and pretended not to notice when Markie spotted it and nudged Beatrice surreptitiously. They claim to be Expert Antique Picture Restorers. They’d need to be, I thought, fervently, pocketing the gelt.

  Crossing the Arcade to Jessica's place, I took a deep breath and plunged into her incense-riddled alcove. Ten minutes later I staggered out stinking like a chemist's shop but happy with my loot (got on deposit, 10 percent), which consisted of a Waterford crystal comfort dish, jug, and decanter. I'd persuaded her they were "new-factory" wares— post-1951—instead of the "old-factory" crystal, which extends back from 1851 to the 1720s. Of course, I'd lied in my teeth, and agreed to pop round her house tomorrow night and settle up what I owed.

  Meanwhile, Tinker had a brass chandelier with a brass Bristol dove finial at the top (no feathers, smooth wings closed). It was mixed-period, because some know-all has always mucked about with them, but it looked fine. I bought it there and then, added a 30 percent markup, and told Tinker to phone Sandy and Mel (not got time to tell you about them, thank heavens). They agreed to buy it. Tinker would ferry the chandelier out, get the money, zoom it to the Arcade, and there buy Margaret's small Japanese shouldered tea jar outright. It had its original tiny ivory lid (think of a decorated draftsman off a checkerboard). I told him to up the price by half, phone a London dealer in Museum Street, say I had flu, but needed the cash by morning. It broke my heart. If I had clapped eyes on it again, I'd never let its dazzling little body out of my sight ever again. As it was. Tinker knew enough to hand it to one of the long-haulage drivers who run England's unofficial nocturnal antique delivery service nationwide faster and safer than ordinary post. It would be in Museum Street by midnight. Then Big Frank from Suffolk bought the Waterford crystal at a good price.

  I reeled on, hurtling Tinker about the town and cadging lifts while I borrowed like mad, spending like a civil servant. Oddly, sometimes when you go berserk things go for you. We found antiques which were unbelievably rare. Tinker even dug out a musical book—Victorian 1880, little projecting tabs trigger a cuckoo's call when you turn to the cuckoo picture, and so on. I'd never even seen one before. Naturally, you also pick up the dross—two 1671 water clocks "by Ed Larkins, Winchester," for example. People get really narked when you tell them that these are all repros by Pearson Page.

  The day faded into dusk. In the Arcade, lights came on. People scurried among the closing shops. Traffic queued at intersections. Stores shuttered for the night. Night schools opened. Car parks filled for our one theater.

  I stormed on like a mad thing, dealing, buying, borrowing, selling—and above all promising, promising, promising. At the finish, Tinker and I were knackered and swilling ale in the Three Cups. He's not daft, and got courage up to ask it after a couple.

  "What do we do about all these frigging IOUs, Lovejoy? You was giving them out like autographs."

  "Do the best you can, Tinker."

  "Eh? Me?" He felt so faint he drank both our pints. "Where'll you be?"

  "Somewhere else for a few days."

  "Leaving me to cope with the whole mess? Jesus." He stared at me, appalled. "They'll have my balls, Lovejoy." He slurped his new pint, and gave a sudden gummy cackle. "Hey, Lovejoy. I can't wait to see Jessica's face when she sees me turn up tomorrow night, instead of you. I knows you pays her in kind, randy sod." He rolled in the aisles at the notion.

  No real need to worry about Tinker. "Hold them off payment till I come back." I had the money to reach Venice. That was all that mattered.

  "How, Lovejoy?"

  "Gawd knows."

  "What about your woman, Connie?"

  I thought a minute. The beer seemed to have gone off. "Forget her," I said, and pushed him my glass.

  Which only goes to show how useless I am at knowing women.

  Early next morning, as I was putting together my spare clothes in my grotty battered suitcase, a special messenger arrived at the cottage with a big manila envelope and an accountant's letter. It read:

  I am informed by Mrs. C. Bridewell, director, that you have accepted responsibility for purchasing on commissio
n ladies' Italian seasonal styles in pattern for the Bridewell shoe-shop chain. Please find accompanying this an open return air ticket to Venice, and funds calculated at average Continental daily rates, as permitted by HM. Inland Revenue. We estimate ten days.

  They remained mine sincerely.

  It was Connie's godspeed. My hand shook as I signed the receipt.

  The lad proudly burned off on his motorbike, with me standing there looking at the air ticket with vision suddenly gone blurred. She hadn't believed me one bit.

  Bloody women, I thought, and locked up.

  9

  Venice. If you've never seen it you can't believe it. And when you clap your eyes on it you still don't believe it.

  I stood on the Riva waterfront utterly bemused. It really is waterborne, floating in the sunlit mist of the lagoon. I've never seen anything like it. Nor, incidentally, has anyone else.

  Since meeting old Mr. Pinder, I'd read like a maniac. Even on the plane to the Marco Polo International Airport— we'd left at an ungodly hour—I was scrabbling through a potted history without gaining much. Clearly, the little maritime republic founded on a mudbank on Friday, March 25, in the Year of Our Lord 421 had done okay for itself. Venice had an eye for the old gelt. But when I got to the bit about the Venetian calendar starting on March 1 and Venetian days officially starting in the evening, I chucked it aside. I was confused enough. I even started on my old Italian course notes, but what can you do with a language where the words for "need" and "dream" are so disturbingly similar? I chucked those aside too. My usual Lovejoy method would have to do—osmosis, fingers crossed, and a penny map.

  Like I said, pathetic.

  The whole waterfront was on the go. Busy, busy. They were all there, massive black and white tugs, barges, the water taxis, waterbuses—all nudging the Riva. I must say, the poles to which they were moored looked decidedly wobbly to me, but there was a jaunty confidence to the scene, as if Venice had had that sort of useless criticism before and so what? Crowds ambled around the vaporetto terminus. Early-season tourists drifted, gazed at the souvenir stalls, peered into canals from bridges.

  Across the lagoon the beautiful San Giorgio Maggiore rose from the vague afternoon mist, and, away beyond, a suggestion of the Lido's buildings showed where the Adriatic Sea was kept at bay. To the left was the Arsenale shipyard, which had turned out a completed warship every day when the Serene Republic was doing over the Turks. To the right across the water, the gold gleams of the Salute church were still celebrating the end of the bubonic plague and marking the start of the Grand Canal.

  But where were the streets, the avenues, the cars? Odd, that, I’d heard of Venice's canals, of course. I just wasn't prepared for the fact that they were everywhere and completely displaced roads. I stood to watch a big liner shushing slowly past, turning in towards the long raised spine of the Giudecca island. Another odd thing—despite the bustle, no noise except for the occasional muffled roar of a water taxi. I finally got the point of Joker Benchley's cable home: "Streets full of water. Please advise." You walk in tiny alleys between the canals, on bridges over the water, or in and out of tiny squares, and that's about it. The fondamente, places where an actual pavement exists, are practically major landmarks and rare enough to have special names. All right, I thought. Venice is simply one hell of a tangle, with hardly anywhere to put your feet.

  But it was still the place where I would find that yacht-owning lemon-colored smoothie and his two goons that did for Crampie and Mr. Malleson. Ledger couldn't touch me here, and with luck some delectable antique might fall my way.

  Right, now. Where to start? I looked about expectantly.

  "You find a welcome, signore?"

  The boatman was smoking nearby. I nodded. "Yes, thank you."

  The water taxi which had brought us from the mainland airport was idle at the wharf. From the way the driver was grinning he had spotted my deception. And I thought I'd been so slick, mingling discreetly with the Cosol tour mob who had flocked off our plane, getting a free sail into Venice. He offered me a fag. I declined with a headshake.

  "First time in Venice, signore?"

  "Very first. It's beautiful." No grass, no countryside, I suddenly realized with delight. Everything— every single thing —in sight was man-made. Boats, canals, houses, wharves, bridges, hotels, churches. Everything. It gave me a funny feeling, almost as if I'd come safe home.

  ''Grazie." He read my glance with the keen skill of centuries. "We have trees and fields, signore—out at Torcello island and places."

  "Deo gratias," I said, thanking God with ambiguous politeness, which restored his approving grin. "Your little signorina was upset because I, ah, borrowed a ride?"

  The Cosol courier was a pretty but distraught girl who had engaged in a ferocious whispered row with him at the airport. She was still inside the hotel seeing to complicated room allocations. He pulled a face.

  'The other girl refused to come this week. Signorina Cosima will have to run all our tours." He shrugged eloquently as if that was the ultimate calamity.

  "Your boat wouldn't be free for a half-hour?" I said, a little too quickly. The penny had dropped at long last.

  "Possibly," he said in a way that left no doubt. "Perhaps I show the signore the Grand Canal, the Rialto Bridge, the—"

  "May I give directions?" I suggested politely.

  He already had the painter in his hand. He nodded at my words, as if Venice constantly received complete strangers who knew their way about.

  The weird familiarity of Venice is quite unnerving. Like coming across your own backyard in, say, darkest Abyssinia. Five minutes after leaving the hotel I was looking expectantly for landmarks which I knew would be there. "Vivaldi's church of la Pietd, non i veto?" I said even before we cast off. It was only five or so buildings along the Riva wharf from the hotel. An instant later, the romantically misnamed Bridge of Sighs, the Doge's Palace, the great Campanile and the Piazza of St. Mark's. Every lovely thing exactly where you expected. We swept grandly past them, me rapturously thinking I was dreaming at the splendor of it all.

  Thin crowds meandered between the long tethered line of nodding gondolas and the start of the slender Marzaria shopping lane which runs off the Piazza. Harry's Bar was in action not far from the waterbus stop. We came abreast and plowed into the Grand Canal. I asked if it was always this crowded.

  "Worse, signore. L’estate!'' The boatman rolled his eyes at the problem of the summer. "Even the Accademia Bridge groans then. The trouble is, everything in Venice is famous."

  "You must be glad—so many customers," I said, "though I suppose many bring their own boats?"

  "Not many," he replied, slowing to deflect his prow from a gondola crossing the canal up ahead. "Visiting boats moor over the other side, facing the Giudecca."

  Important news, for when the Eveline arrived. "I hadn't expected the Grand Canal to be so wide."

  All innocent, I asked him to let me watch the gondola. In it, four people stood solemnly upright while the gondola crossed the canal. Our boat idled by the little wooden jetties.

  "Fixed fare on the traghetto, the gondola ferry." He spoke with scorn. "That's all they do—to and fro."

  My eyes were drawn to the adjacent buildings fronting the canal's splashy water.

  "Do many foreigners have a palace here?"

  "Palazzo," he corrected politely. I'd used the English word by mistake. "Merely means a grand house, in Venice. Yes, plenty come. Most stay in hotels such as that, in the campo there by the traghetto jetty." His gaze idled across the campo to the tall pink-washed palazzo opposite. "Others, the rich, buy their own palazzi."

  It was all I could do not to turn and stare at the building. What was it old Pinder had said so dreamily by his fireside when trying to persuade me to work for him? The hours I have watched the traghetto men smoke and talk in the campo below my window in the Grand Canal!

  "No pavement," I observed, my excitement just barely under control. The houses just drop s
heer into the water. Therefore no place to stroll casually past in the dark hours and test the strength of the palazzo's drainpipes, because there was simply nowhere to stroll.

  "Vero," the boatman said. "Except one can walk in the campo, and even reach the Basilica on foot."

  The narrow space had once been a tiny field, hence its name. One side, that hotel. The other side, the palazzo of Mrs. Lavinia Norman—if I'd guessed right. I needed my map, where the palazzi were named.

  "Are there many traghetti in Venice?"

  "Very few." He coughed to draw my attention. "Signore. The waterbus is approaching. And the traghetto has crossed long since."

  "Ah. Sorry. Fine." I nodded for him to go ahead, irritated at being too obvious.

  The waterbus was creaming towards its stop, a wobbling T-shaped jetty full of intending passengers.

  "To the Rialto Bridge, signore? Or the Fenice Theater? You'll know we Venetians invented opera."

  "You've a lot to answer for." His face fell, but I honestly can't understand why every little opera takes a fortnight. I glanced forward. "Show me the shape of Venice, please."

  ''Subito,” he said, and we took off up the Grand Canal.

  Everything is fantastic when you think about it long enough. But some things are just simply mindblowers by nature. Venice is one of them.

  It's a man-made universe of alleys, ancient houses, and great— great —churches crammed onto a maze of canals. And where? On 117 islets, in a lagoon over two hundred square miles big, that's where, with the Adriatic Sea muttering sullenly just over a mile from the main island cluster which is Venice proper. Like the water bloke said, everything in Venice is famous. But to grow accustomed to Venice you'd need a lifetime. I was amazed at everything.

  Venice is singing cage birds at canal-side windows. Venice is exquisite shops and window dressing. Venice is inverted-funnel chimneys, leaning campaniles, wrought iron at doors and windows, grilles at every fenestration, little flower sellers, droves of children and noisy youths. Venice is bridges every few yards, narrow alleys where you have to duck to get under the houses which have crammed so close they've merged to make a flat tunnel. Venice is patchy areas of din—from speedboats racing to deposit their owners in cafes to do nothing hour upon hour—and silence. It's uncanny, really, how it can be broad day and all is silent. The canals glass. Nothing moves. The calli empty. Bridges hang in permanent solitude of space and time, as if the world was concentrating. Then, somnolently ambling round a confined comer, you're suddenly wedged in a dense, crowded people-jam pandemonium between glittering shops. It's the abruptness of the transition that gets me every time: tranquillity into hubbub. Venice is a million separate sound barriers. Venice even has its methods—police boats, waterbuses, grocery boats, even funeral gondolas and barges conveniently moored facing the Madonna dell' Orto church on the side of Venice nearest the cemetery island. And the whole set of islands and lagoon on the go.